Back Then You Swam Rather Like A Butterfly

its moist blow haloing fellow passengers
in some careering car
of a trained train–

the mucilaginous scree
catapaulting me
to my bed with a bad flu,
while you, not yet a drop
in my bucket, made
ready–

my husband catching it too,
and too recovering
in that same bed.

God bless, I may have said,
in subway’s weary blear–but how was I
so blessed?

Your essence bright blinked some
months later, newborn eyes as dark
as so many kinds
of wisdom–that earth that nourishes
roots, that night that blues
dawn’s horizon, the lifting sides of all the different wings
that astonish us–
what just flew there–flies–

*****************

Poem of sorts for Bjorn Rudberg’s prompt on Real Toads about the butterfly effect. (True story may be a little more complex. Ha.)

The catch in commuting is always that sneeze… The consequences are bad and can be worse. Somehow afterwards it may turn to something good, but those days in bed are rarely so. I love where you took it.

I had trouble getting here yesterday, karin–the page would pop an error message whenever I tried to comment, and the poem would vanish. But it’s here today, and a lovely one it is, particularly the conclusion, with its sense of how interconnected the largest things are with the smallest, and cause and effect can be like the beat of iridescent wings up, down, flown.